A new book by discredited partisans is meant to rile GOP voter vigilantes.

Right-wingers are in a tizzy over excerpts from a new book by two of the GOP’s leading voter-fraud hucksters alleging that Minnesota’s Democratic Senator Al Franken would not have won a statewide recount in 2009 were it not for ex-felons voting illegally. [...]

The problem with this assertion—from a new book by The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund and George W. Bush Justice Department attorney Hans von Spakovsky—is that it is not just factually wrong [...]

Bonnifield sent a questionnaire to every Minnesota county prosecutor and found not one allegation of voter fraud was prosecutable beyond the issues facing the ex-felons—there was no double voting, underage voting, voter impersonation, coercion of elderly or disabled voters, or non-citizen voting. [...]

In a state where 2.9 million people voted in November 2008, even if there were 243 illegal voters—and that includes people who have not yet been proven guilty—less than one-thousandth of 1 percent of the state’s electorate registered or voted illegally. [...]

But beyond arguments over voter ID, there is a bigger point. Republicans increasingly have been trying to tilt the rules surrounding all aspects of voting in recent elections—from restricting voter registration drives, to rules validating voter registration applications, to presenting more specific forms of ID to get a ballot, to toughening the rules for counting provisional ballots given to people who lack that ID, to suing afterwards if the vote count is close. All of these tactics are in play in the 2012 presidential election.

Beyond ignoring the facts, the implicit racism in this latest charge may be its most repugnant feature, as many felons are presumed not likely to be white.

Remember the big uproar over Komen's decision to pull funding from Planned Parenthood? Add this new controversy to the mix: Two Dartmouth Medical School professors are saying that the organization is distorting statistics in order to sell mammograms.

They launched magazine ads last October that claimed "The five-year survival rate for breast cancer when caught early is 98 percent. When it's not? 23 percent." However:

“The only reliable way to know that a screening test works is the extent to which it reduces deaths in a randomized trial,” write Woloshin and Schwartz.

And what do those trials tell us? They show that mammography screening reduces the likelihood that a woman in her 50s will die from breast cancer over the next 10 years from 0.53 percent to 0.46 percent, a difference of 0.07 percentage points.

That’s a long, long way from the 75 percentage points cited in the Koman ad. Furthermore, as Woloshin and Schwartz point out, the ad says nothing about the harms of screening: the unnecessary biopsies that occur with false positive results and the unnecessary chemotherapy, radiation or surgery that women go through when they are overdiagnosed.

The problem is that a five-year survival rate is easy to manipulate, [Dr. Steven Woloshin] said. The ad compares five-year survival rates for early-stage cancers and late-stage cancers, which Woloshin said is not a meaningful way to measure the benefits of screening.

Think Progress does it again. If anyone can expose the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and their zillions of dollars of money-trailitude to GOP campaigns, they can.

Oh, and about that outsourcing:

Today, a new report by the nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog Campaign Money Watch found that more than 1.4 million jobs were outsourced since 1994 in the nine states in which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is spending significant money. The group also found that more than 184,000 jobs were lost to outsourcing in the 22 congressional districts in which the Chamber has spent $4.8 million on political ads in the same time period.